Florida school vouchers leave a giant hole in the state budget

[Zorro]

The talk in Tallahassee right now is all about tax cuts, but did you know that Florida will soon face multibillion-dollar budget deficits? I was at the capital recently, and legislators were reluctant to discuss it. We have no choice. It is hurting K-12 education today, and left unchecked it will affect criminal justice, public safety, transportation, health care — any public service. We must tackle the problem head on, but first we need to understand it.

Florida’s Legislative Budget Commission looks three years ahead. While they expect a surplus for fiscal 2025-26, things then quickly turn sour. The commission anticipates deficits of $2.8 billion the following year and $6.9 billion the year after that. Spending on K-12 education is the biggest driver digging that budget hole. (A close second is Medicaid.) Florida public schools have been funded below inflation year-over-year for 20 years, so how can that be?

The answer, in a word, is school vouchers. They have been around for a generation in Florida but in 2023 they expanded beyond all recognition, without the necessary accountability. The cost to taxpayers is now $4 billion and growing, a leading cause of the looming budget crisis.

Vouchers started 25 years ago as a limited program to help students with disabilities fund special services. Soon after, they expanded to include students from low-income families who attended underperforming schools. The program kept morphing and growing to culminate two years ago in “universal vouchers.” Basically, that means vouchers for everybody with no limits for family income, and even those who already attend private schools can get them. Right now, a voucher student receives $9,163.75 to be home-schooled or go to private school without the academic oversight we expect for Florida tax dollars.

https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2025/05/01/florida-school-vouchers-leave-giant-hole-education-budgets-column/

Universal vouchers -- brought to you by DeSantis and Florida Republicans as a backdoor way to fund religious schools and starve those "woke" public schools.

[HAB911]

1. I wonder

where all the lottery money for education has gone?

[Timeflyer]

2. Bankrupting the Florida Public Education system was the plan all along. GOP donors who commodify students know

that sucking up public tax dollars with "vouchers," with no upper income limits for parents grabbing that voucher money, is not sustainable. They hire the politicians who make the laws that allow them to make money privatizing most of Florida's schools. The hell with educational standards--whose going to pay for oversight of curriculum standards, or check on teacher certification? Corruption is the rule, not the exception here, and fighting against it is exhausting.